Margot Renard is an art historian and a postdoctoral researcher within the COMICS research group, directed by Maaheen Ahmed at UGent. Her research project focuses on the contemporary relationship between comics and history in France. She seeks to analyze how comics recently became a laboratory for reflection on the practices and meanings of history.
Her thesis, defended in 2018, studied the formation of the French national narrative in the first half of the 19th century, especially in illustrated history books. The monograph drawn from her thesis is published by Mare & Martin under the title Aux origines du roman national. La construction d’un mythe par les images, de Vercingétorix aux Sans-culottes (1814-1848).
Previously, she was a study engineer in the research project ArtTransForm (Transnational Artistic Formations between France and Germany, 1843-1870), co-directed by France Nerlich and Bénédicte Savoy and funded by the National Agencies for Research of France and Germany. She was also a Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Tours (France) from 2017 to 2020, and obtained the CAPES, the French secondary-school teaching diploma, in history and geography, in 2021.
She is a member of the editorial board of the online journal Entre-Temps (Collège de France), addressing the various ways in which (public) history is written today, from fictional to non-fictional forms. As a comics researcher, she is a member of the ACME group and of the network La Brèche.
New book out
Aux origines du roman national La construction d’un mythe par les images, de Vercingétorix aux Sans-culottes (1814-1848)
